The Fool

This is probably the most exciting tea we sourced this year out in the vast mountains of Yunnan.  It comes from a village just a few dozen kilometers from Bingdao, home of the highly sought sweet and gentle raw puer.  This village, named Baka (no specific meaning or connection to the Japanese word), is a small village of twenty or thirty households clinging to a mountainside across from the Dijie Village.  All the teas in this area carry with them a trace of Bingdao, a gentle sweetness that permeates the session.

The production is small, just Xiao Liu and his family making as much tea as they can with two small wood-fired woks.  They make the tea is a similar way to how we saw it being made in Bingdao, lower heat and a longer time in the wok, this creates a sweeter tea that is highly drinkable fresh.

When the dry leaves are placed in the warmed gaiwan, There is a sweet fragrance of cereal grains and hop flowers.  This fragrance actually gets sweeter as the leaves are infused with water, redolent of mixed berries and yoghurt. 

The brew is a light yellow that is predominantly sweet, similar to it’s close neighbor, Bingdao.  By car, one can reach Bingdao’s core region from the Baka core region in just about half an hour, which explains the similarity in these teas.  As the session progresses, the sweetness gets more and more pronounced reminding us of the juice that is pressed from sugar canes on the streets of Southern China.

After spending some time in the Mengku region, traveling out to Bingdao and then to Baka, the similarity between these two teas is undeniable, and yet the price is astronomically different.  While a lot of Baka teas likely get repackaged as Bingdao, we are proud to declare this tea for what it is, a sweet and gentle tea from Baka Village in the Mengku area.  Though we would be lying if we didn’t close our eyes toward the end of the session, as the tea gets sweeter and pretend we are drinking Bingdao.